Apple v. Samsung juror: we “wanted to send a message” | Hacker News Reader

Apple v. Samsung juror: we “wanted to send a message”

arstechnica.com

43 pointsiProject84 comments

I do not blame anyone, nor do I support anyone. My fair view is that Samsung DID cross the border by making their phones look too similar to the iPhone..BUT Apple shouldn't have won either, because what they have is a bunch of Bullshit patents just to hinder their competitors' success. (Rounded rectangles, Slide to unlock, Elastic bounce, seriously?)

One thing I can conclude honestly (also from my own personal experience) is that we live in a very unfair world, being ruled by an unfair system, where someone who has the highest amount money will always WIN and RULE the system. Our governments are in bed with the entertainment industries for a reason. Think about it (ACTA, SOPA..etc). I was expecting the result to be something like what happened in Korea, where Samsung And Apple were found guilty and BOTH had to pay for damages. But this is a ridiculous - Apple has been sued by numerous competitors and yet it didn't infringe even a single patent? Come on...clearly this system is biased.

For those who think Apple deserved to win, Apple did not do this to protect their IP, they are just suppressing their competitors by suing them. Why is Apple going after HTC and Motorola? I personally own a HTC and it looks and feels nothing like an iPhone. Apple might have 'innovated' as many claim it to have, but it has hindered more innovation than it has ever contributed. The case for HTC, Samsung and others today might be the case for you and me tomorrow as well, considering we start a phone company tomorrow. We are as vulnerable as they are. And Apple is the most innovative company in the world? Come on..innovation by litigation??

Well Apple, your end is very near, which is reflected by your panic, suing your competitors. This won't last very long and there will be someone to say 'Fuck you' to you very soon. Till then, enjoy your happiness while it lasts.

Edit: And this original article saying 'We wanted to send a message' is plain BS. I find nothing wrong in Samsung's designer talking about the iPhone in his e-mails or comparing Samsung's phones with it. If Apple would have done it, it would have been 'taking inspiration', now since Samsung has done it, it is a 'copycat'. What an unfair system..If the guy wanted to send a message it clearly should have been 'Fuck patents and litigation, focus on innovation'.

Instead, the message I see from this guy is 'Apple will pretend to innovate, whoever innovates beyond them will be sued and will never WIN'

BONUS: Apple's 'innovation': http://phandroid.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10...

It sounds like the patent owner took the case personally, made every other juror there fantasize about owning patents and being screwed over, and greed won their opinions at the end of the day.

I believe he fantasized himself. Does anyone know of post 1990s a case where the small guy won in patent litigation against BigCo (I'm genuinely curious)? If it was his patent, I think he would want to defend it, but I doubt he could.

If you look at the quotes, it's pretty obvious he took it personally:

"When I got in this case and I started looking at these patents I considered: ‘If this was my patent and I was accused, could I defend it?’” Hogan explained. On the night of Aug. 22, after closing arguments, “a light bulb went on in my head,” he said. “I thought, I need to do this for all of them." -- Jury Foreman (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-25/apple-samsung-ju...)

I did not follow the case at all, but how did the litigators obtain internal Samsung emails ?

Anyone still defending Apple as the underdog now needs to sit up and realize that Apple is now the 800lb gorilla.

Not really. Take the patent system away, and all Apple has is a nice market share, a fat war chest and it's own ability to produce interesting products.

Apple has taken the posture of the 800lb gorilla with a questionable legal maneuver, leveraging a patent systems its competitors were happy to support to keep smaller players down until it was used against them. And Apple can still lose the next move in this legal chess game if Google takes them on.

This is very different from for instance the Microsoft of the '90s that had so much market power of its own it could dictate terms and kill competition simply with money and threats.

That was a real 800lb gorilla. Apple is playing a very dangerous game by faking it through dubious legal tactics. But one court decision that doesn't go their way can completely kill that.

"Take the patent system away, and all Apple has is a nice market share, a fat war chest and it's own ability to produce interesting products."

Also the fact that Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

"Take the patent system away"

Yeah, and Apple also isn't the 800lb gorilla when I can fly around on magic monkeys.

I have criticized the argument that "Apple made a lot of money, so they must have been innovative."

Just as wrong is the argument that "Apple has made a lot of money, so they don't need IP protection." The alternate universe where Apple has no patent protection on its designs is a very different one from this one, and one in which competitors would have been outright duplicating a whole lot more.

Regardless of whether this ruling was correct or incorrect, I don't think anyone imagined Apple as the underdog in quite some time. (If you used a time machine to tell 20-year-ago me that Apple was the new evil empire while Bill Gates was off trying to cure malaria I would have laughed you off.)

Also, being the underdog or the overdog should not affect one's property rights. If a tiny small company does/does not deserve protection, then so does a big one.

Agree. This post of yours sums it up nice and impartial. I have a hard time trying to convince myself the jury wasn't prejudiced in a way or other.

But at the same time Samsung still ventured bit too far into the imitation land. They should have got fined just enough to act as a deterrent but this verdict enables more than that - it virtually guarantees Apple a monopoly over selling touchscreen devices by asserting their patents' validity to the extent that they will have little trouble shutting off competition from anyone other than Microsoft. That's the _real_ bad news here.

Well this is just hyperbole.

Since when are pinch to zoom and the specific Apple bounce back effect mandatory requirements for making a touchscreen device ? Especially given how for the bounce back effect there are now at least three non-infringing alternatives in shipping devices from Samsung, HTC and Motorola.

Tap to zoom, pinch to zoom, bounce back, rounded rectangles with glass etc. are obvious features people expect in a touchscreen device that is manipulated using fingers. If you are not going to have an ability to pinch and zoom or tap and zoom you can still sell a device without those abilities but you cannot get very far in the highly competitive marketplace.

Remember between Microsoft and Apple they can patent the few ways to zoom and when courts validate those you will have smart phone competition without the ability to zoom. That's just one example.

>Tap to zoom, pinch to zoom, bounce back, rounded rectangles with glass etc. are obvious features people expect in a touchscreen device that is manipulated using fingers.

These are obvious features now. They weren't obvious in 2007 when the iPhone was released. Apple basically dictated the language of the consumer smartphone when it released the iPhone in 2007.

Weren't a lot of those interactions developed in academia before the iPhone came out? e.g. Jeff Han's TED talk, 2006: http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...

It's kind of bs that Apple can sue for people copying their gestures when they clearly were inspired by previous research on the topic..

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/if-android-is-a-s...

By they have "patents," so what should Universities do, should Universities spend all their time and resources patenting every little idea they come up with just in case some company decides to come along and copy them? Or maybe, just maybe, patent law juries should be required to actually properly review prior art, as the jurists in this case have admitted to ignoring?*

* http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-appl... "It was bogging us down."

I mean, honestly, if juries won't consider prior art because there is TOO MUCH OF IT, how can we expect to take patent law seriously?

Minority Report came out in 2002. It contains pinch-to-zoom. It is obvious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ

Edit: Another commenter linked to this 2002 video, which is a better example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waSXkJBKT1s&t=2m19s

That should not give them exclusive rights to making what can be called a smart phone in 2012. Also both pinch to zoom and rounded rects have a solid prior art.

Not to mention "tap to zoom."

I mean, WTF...

They're obvious features now because we can actually use two objects (our fingers) to interact with the screen at once. Pinch to zoom wasn't at all obvious when everything only could be touched once (PDA's) or not touched at all.

It seems only obvious to pinch to zoom something, but we could not have done that until a full touch interface.

Some days ago I posted this link: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html These word sum it up for me:

"In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation.""

The link also provides a nice overview of the history of touch.

>> we wanted something more than a slap on the wrist."

Wasn't the jury under instructions not to dole out punitive damages? That's left to the judge, the amount of which has yet to be decided.

Maximum punitive damages are limited to 3x the original amount [1 billion], so the fact that this number was apparently inflated is non-trivial. [1]

>> "I was thinking about the patents, and thought, 'If this were my patent, could I defend it?'" Hogan recalled. "Once I answered that question as yes, it changed how I looked at things."

This juror clearly skirted the line of impartiality. I will have to read the whole interview. The notion of vigilante jurors doling out punishment based on their own bias is unsettling.

As an aside, it's not clear how Samsung's legal team let this guy onto the jury in the first place.

[1]http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2012/08/apple-wins-105-billi...

> As an aside, it's not clear how Samsung's legal team let this guy onto the jury in the first place.

I think it has become clear now :)

From reading Grisham (?) novels, I think each side only get a certain number of jury challenges. Maybe they ran out of challenges.

All the parties involved are aware what a risk jury trials can be. It's why many companies settle, and Lucy Koh specifically warned them about this before the jury began to deliberate. They made their bed as far as I'm concerned. I do have a problem with the jury being criticized though. This happens in all high-profile cases where some group of people dislike the decision. Judges are very protective of juries for this reason.

In my opinion, if you start speaking to the press, it's fair game for the public to criticize. You don't want to be knocked for a controversial decision? Don't go blabbing on record.

>> Lucy Koh specifically warned them about this before the jury began to deliberate

To me, this is absolutely the most interesting part of the case. I'm wondering who refused to blink in this game of chicken.

I've seen some reports that Apple approached Samsung with some highball settlement terms as a starting point for negotiations, but I'm wondering if Samsung's execs just decided to dig in their heels because of pride.

I'm making a big assumption here, but in Chinese culture, "face" --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept) -- is a big deal, especially the higher up you go in the food chain. I've seen relatives do stupid things just to "save face" or "give face". Not being Korean, I don't know whether "face" is a big deal, but I know their culture operates on similar ideas.

Saving face is huge everywhere in Asia AFAIK. Shame is a driving emotion, rather than guilt as in Western cultures. So not wanting to shame the company name could've been a driving factor.

When the jury indicate that they didn't read the jury instructions and consequently did things that they were not meant to do, it's completely fair for them to be criticised.

Hell, if anyone else in the courtroom did something of a similar nature, it'd be a mistrial, so how is that an overlookable offense?

It's amazing that no matter how much you pay lawyers, they can be this incompetent.

First they somehow never managed to get the patent review process going that Google proved could wipe out bogus trivial patents. Then Samsung's legal team missed deadlines to produce their prior art research. Then they stuffed the arguments about tablet computer trade dress into the largest part of their time and won that but failed to save time to make a case about smart phones.

And most importantly, they let an obviously biased holder of silly patents who feels great pride in them get on the jury and lead it straight to this conclusion as foreman. Did they sleep through voir dire?

Did the Samsung lawyers deliberately throw the case for some reason? Maybe the Korean corporate culture rubbed them the wrong way and they simply couldn't communicate effectively or they were hit with an epidemic of contagious chronic fatigue or something.

I believe they used this trial to buy some time. They have many grounds to file an appeal now (think of the evidence they introduced too late, which was rejected). Until then, the verdict will not be final. Meanwhile, their old products which infringe can be phased out of the market without much cost. The newer products have their own style (Galaxy S III for example).

The biggest danger they face now is the potential blocking of their most profitable products from the US market. But they likely can fix this all in software in the time until this ban can come into effect.

In US courts, you can't ordinarily introduce new evidence on appeal. You can argue that the trial court made errors in applying the law, but if those errors involved excluding evidence, the most you can expect out of that is another trial. (And even that's pretty rare; if they were counting on being able to do that, it's a hell of a gamble.)

That's interesting. It gives the other argument why they withheld the evidence (Apple would have countered it) more weight.

In my experience, this is fairly standard for lawyers. Sometimes they are all too human. The problem is the consequences of their occasional (YMMV) incompetence can be so huge and far-reaching, as with this case.

It looks like they felt the most damning evidence were emails where Samsung was told to back off from copying Apple but did not heed their partners advice.

Well that juror's patent sure is innovative...

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sec...

Did he just describe a DVD/BluRay video recorder or a HD recorder which the harddrive is removable (basically all of them)?

That patent is ridiculous.

It describes a DVR-like device that has the ability to copy media from the Internet to some sort of flash drive to later view on a television. It can also function as a web browser and a video editor.

It's quite specific, so I'm not sure why you find it ridiculous.

Copying files, even a specific implementation, doesn't seem worthy of patent protection.

That would be true if this was just copying files. It's obviously not.

Would you mind explaining the hidden complexity in it? The claims certainly seem obvious and trivial to me as well.

Really? It's pretty specific, and I don't think anything like it exists right now. You would need a device made specifically to download videos from numerous sources onto an fixed internal drive. It would also need to be able to transfer the videos to an internal removable drive (not sure what this means, possibly SD card or removable HDD?) and play them back, edit them, and do additional processing to them.

It doesn't sound like any Blu-Ray play I've ever seen. It's more like an Internet DVR device that also lets you edit videos and play them back on your TV from the device. That sounds pretty non-trivial to me.

One of the things you can do with BitTorrent clients is to have the client look for new torrents in specific locations (new episodes of a show for instance). The client with download the show to whatever location you specified, which could include a USB device if you so chose.

That seems pretty similar to me.

It sounds like a computer.

It's specific yes, but it is also obvious.

In 2002, it was NOT obvious, and that is the point. Of course, we can look at something like PTZ or a bouncing edge and think, "It's so obvious, how else would you do this?" And Samsung or HTC or even Google could have figured it out and patented it - but they didn't. Apple did, and that is why we are here now.

Different argument. The patent under discussion in this subthread is that of jury foreman Velvin Hogan, which was completely obvious back in 2001 when he filed it.

The jurors in this case were reviewed by both Apple and Samsung legal teams during the "Voir dire" process - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voir_dire#Use_in_the_United_Sta... .

The process goes like this: each party, taking turns, gets to ask a question about potential jurors background or their current situation. Jurors that show potential bias or inability to deliver an independent ruling are thrown out (either by the judge's decision or by using a limited amount of discretionary vetoes that each party has).

It's a major failure for Samsung's legal team to allow Hogan to stand, considering his background. I doubt these lawyers to be ever able to represent again a tech company in a court of law.

As Groklaw pointed out, the jury was specifically instructed that the damages awarded should reflect the amount of money lost, not punish or "send a message" to Samsung. It's also pretty clear that the jury rushed through things, even if they say they didn't. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4430341 Samsung will probably use the jurors' statements in their appeal.

Samsung will probably use the jurors' statements in their appeal.

I don't think Samsung can. It is being reported that Federal rules don't allow them to consider jurors statements about the proceedings as evidence.

They spend 2 and 1/2 days talking about it. Don't forget they had plenty of time to consider the evidence while it was being presented so the only thing they need to talk about was what they disagreed on. Which probably was mostly about how willful Samsung's infringement was, because that's the hardest thing to determine in cases like this.

The 100+ pages of jury instructions were only provided on the 21st. Aside from their own comments that they "didn't need the jury instructions", there is this follow-up that shows a lot of inconsistencies in the verdict. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012082510525390

edited

They used 100 pages, but it's hardly a small book.

Consider this is a 'full' page.

FINAL JURY INSTRUCTION NO. 83 MONOPOLIZATION—INTERSTATE CONDUCT The federal antitrust laws apply only to conduct that affects interstate commerce. In this case, there is no dispute that Samsung’s conduct affected interstate commerce.

These jury instructions were not 100+ pages of narrative. They were mostly "check the box" questions. I don't know if it's unreasonable to go through them in a few days if you already had a general feeling that Samsung had done wrong.

You're probably thinking of the ~10-page verdict form? This is the jury instructions: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/ApplevSamsung-1903.pdf

Holy cow. I heard people say "100+ pages of Jury Instructions!!" and imagined some George RR Martin novel. But so many of those pages contain just a few sentences. Any adult should be able to read that in an hour; marking the places they really need to concentrate on and reading those later would take at most another hour.

No. That is Groklaw's interpretation of what he said. He could have simply meant that by finding Samsung guilty of willful infringement that they were punishing them.

And I don't understand what you're implying by saying that they rushed through the case. Do you think they would have changed their mind or "woken up to the truth" if they were in the room longer ?

"We felt like we were 100 percent fair, but we wanted something more than a slap on the wrist." That's a direct quote. Ars Technica might have taken it out of context, but it looks like the jury was going for a punitive amount instead of damages.

Given that a number devices were excluded and the maximum damages were not awarded it is clear that they at least evaluated the merits of each specific infringement.

So do you have some evidence that they ignored the proper damages awarding process ?

>So do you have some evidence that they ignored the proper damages awarding process ?

Well, there's the part where they awarded damages in at least one instance where they had not actually found infringement.

As if pinch to zoom couldn't be suggested by a ten year old when presented with the problem of zooming on a multi-touch interface.

Software patents are a joke.

People hate on software patents like they were hating on the cellphone industry just 5 years ago.

One company doubled down on their innovation while disrupting their own major revenue channel. Meanwhile, the many stagnant phone manufactures continued copy/pasting crap because that's all they knew. BlackBerry executives went so far as to call Jobs' 2007 iPhone launch a "bluff" and an "impossible feat of engineering".

Maybe multi-touch is painfully obvious on the surface, but end-to-end execution and total consumer package made the iPhone what it is today -- and that wasn't obvious until you held it in your hand, and everything just clicked. So in that regard, I think it's fair for Apple to protect their entire pie by defending the slices/key ingredients.

PS. It took a few years before "pinch and zoom" was actually comparable to the fluidity of iOS. Some implementations on Android were a complete joke.

PPS. I don't disagree that the patent process could use some revisions, but to dismiss the process entirely is just silly -- including software.

People were right to hate the cellphone industry 5 years ago. The best things available were Nokia candybar phones -- approaching the Ford Escort in terms of reliability -- and the Palm Treo, which was more or less the apex of combining a PDA with a phone without actually doing much integration. People are currently right to hate cellphone service providers.

As later history would reveal, BlackBerry executives were entirely correct to consider the iPhone an "impossible feat of engineering" -- from their point of view. RIM had huge market share, yet couldn't engineer its way out of a stapled paper bag.

There was also the HTC Wizard, introduced in October 2005.

It was pretty much the best thing out there for quite a while.

I agree it's the end-to-end execution that made the iPhone a success. But Samsung had a completely different end-to-end execution, right?

I agree with being able to sue for a complete copy of end-to-end, or even an attempt to. I just didn't see it in this case, especially with all the prior art. I don't understand the recipe analogy, to me it's like Bush's Beans suing another bean company for the inclusion of cocoa in the recipe. I'm baffled that you feel pinch to zoom should be patentable.

No. That's the point of the case. Samsung DIDN'T have a completely different end to end execution. It was a blatant copy from the packaging, hardware design, software UI elements, connectors etc. And Samsung had documents demonstrating this.

Microsoft and Palm are examples of unique end to end execution.

I certainly hope that patents aren't intended to protect realizing that something has economic value. I personally hold "This is an obvious way to do this" and "I can make a lot of money if I do this" to be nearly orthogonal. I'm a little tired of people claiming Apple deserves government protection because they discovered a market.

Apparently it wasn't so obvious in 2007 when all the handset makers scoffed at the iPhone.

Pretty sure the big deal, if you break it down to component parts, was actually having a capacitive touch screen rather than resistive. Fingers instead of styluses opened a whole new world of phone interactions.

If they had patents on multitouch hardware itself, power to them. But software patents? Meh.

Pinch and zoom in 2001 on a capacitive screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waSXkJBKT1s&t=2m19s

This was presented in the case. Apple argued it didn't represent prior art because:

1. The screen was a projector and therefor this showed two devices. (Capacitive CRTs have excited since the 80s)

2. Samsung didn't present the code for this implementation in time, so it could not be proved that this was either object oriented or event-based.

So Apple's non-obvious extension of prior art was to 1. do this exact thing on a non-projector device, 2. use event-based code.

So, basic software development on new hardware.

Gotcha.

Isn't scoffing at a new competitor just going through the motions required of you? No one is going to say "darn they beat us to it" to the press.

I don't think anyone was scoffing because of pinch-to-zoom, though.

The jurors blatantly disregarded the court's instructions. They were to be thorough, unbiased and apply the law, not send a message. Good chance for a mistrial.

...I still don't get it why corporations are STUPID enough not to implement a system where old emails get deleted (in an unrecoverable way) after something like a week (ok, maybe they would have to invent their own messaging protocol with DRM-like features baked in, but still, it would totally worth the effort considering the legal risk of emails) ...or for god's sake, do "important" communication by voice-calls if not just face-to-face private meetings, but just don't leave this electronic "paper trail" that can turn back to legally "blow you up" at any time!

For those not watching the stock marker: Nokia (NOK) up nearly 9% on this ...

It seems the whole jury quickly became biased towards the "patent holder" (whichever patent that may be) "thanks" to Hogan, not to mention they didn't even bother to consider prior art or to invalidate Apple's patents, which was a huge thing to consider, but they acted as if it wasn't. Just because a patent was afforded doesn't mean it was a good one. I'm not too familiar with how juries work in US, but the whole thing doesn't seem right to me. The jury should've been completely impartial.

Did you see how Samsung emails noting Samsung was told by Google to back off from copying Apple and they didnt is what persuaded their decision?

You don't know how juries work but yet according to you they weren't impartial.

Can't fault that logic.

Honestly, the more these cretins open their mouths, the more I think Tim Cook might have to commission an "unsend" feature for Mail.app.

Well considering only one of the jurors had an iPhone and two had Android phones maybe it would be Google needing to add this feature ?

Anybody who confuses say... a Samsung Galaxy S II for ANY version of the iPhone is just plain stupid.

"sending a message" and "being 100% fair" are mutually exclusive. "Sending a message" is explicitly overpunishing a transgression so that news gets around about the harshness of the penalty.

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